Examples of rich, long-form, long-haul, brand-led content that don’t add to the noise
Let’s face it, success in marketing generally is difficult. In digital channels we can only see this getting harder and harder. In fact research this week by EMC showed evidence that there’ll be 32 Billion connected devices on the Internet by 2020. How brands get cut-through in the volume of traffic and data on that scale is therefore huge. Of course, with all the potential, it also reveals vast opportunity for those that can get it right.
What works in this emerging reality? There’s no "one size fits all answer", and yet rich, visual and long-form content marketing - complimenting real-time, social media and micro content - uses much higher levels of consideration and quality, it’s already demonstrating where brands can steal a march on their noisier, less considered competitors. We’ve seen long form content work wonders…
A review comparing different technical solutions for Ecommerce integration with behavioural email marketing
Triggered messaging is a rapidly growing part of marketing with extremely good ROI. It's about delivering business messages that are personalized and near-real time, resulting in very good engagement. All email marketers should be doing this if they're not already!
My previous post in this series explained when triggered messages were effective, for example for cart abandonment and onboarding sequences. This follow-up is a brief summary of the three main implementation strategies for triggered emails, using:
1. Just your E-commerce system.
2. Just your ESP.
3. A real-time marketing system (RTMS).
Using just your Ecommerce system
Many Ecommerce systems can send a few types of triggered messages, for example 'purchase complete' and 'cart abandonment, either natively or using third-party plug-ins. (There are lots of these, for example Abandon Carts Alert Pro for Magento and EDD Abandon…
Fight the Big Data Backlash and use Smart Data help you identify purchase intent
Big data is starting to experience some significant backlash. A ‘case in point’ comes from a recent popular article in VentureBeat: ‘Big data’ is dead. What’s next? The backlash is more to do with the buzz than the data but the reason relates to the difficulty of extracting meaningful insights from big data.
Born from the backlash comes another buzzword; smart data, a means of extracting these meaningful insights from big data.
Looking past the marketing hype, smart data is actually the metamorphosis of big data into something actionable. Here we look at recognizing purchase intent as an example of actionable data extraction.
Big data vs Smart data rundown
So let’s start with the basic question of what is big data? Big data refers to massive volumes of structured and unstructured…
Digital change management and getting buy-in for digital marketing transformation
One of the key aspects of evolving a traditional company into a digital company is getting buy-in. One of the challenges is that digital simply isn’t understood. Some Chief Executives think digital is tactical, it refers to activities like sending out newsletters, improving Facebook page or online catalogue. As a result, digital is often delegated to the most junior person in the building who is perceived to have a great understanding of the business functionality of tools like Facebook.
The exec team are missing the bigger picture. What’s worse is that less reputable agencies have constructed myths that it’s complicated and difficult and explain that only ‘masters of the art’ are able to access analytics, manage Instagram or increase Twitter followers.
The path towards digital transformation is littered with disaster. There have been many Twitter…
A 4 Step guide to maximising your own resources for your content strategy
When it comes to building a strong digital campaign, many businesses underestimate the value of the information and resources they already have – particularly if they are specialists such as negligence lawyers and recruiters who have a wealth of statistics at their fingertips.
The key to creating engaging content is to assess how you can transform the information you already have into a resource that portrays user-friendly and valuable facts about your industry. This will automatically increase the chance of someone who requires your services finding your business organically online.
4 ways to create shareable and unique content using your own resources
1. Define your end goal?
As with all marketing strategies, identify your goal before devising a plan to achieve it. This will give you the information required to assess the customer you are looking to attract and the type of…
Avoid the mistakes of video marketing by using animated videos effectively
Traditional video marketing is declining in viewing popularity – this post looks at what can be done to reverse this trend and highlights animated videos as a simple, cost-effective and highly engaging way to get more eyeballs on your video content
Video marketing is becoming increasingly popular with more and more marketers using videos to get their message out there, as well as competing for as many eyeballs as possible! In fact 50% of users watch business related videos On YouTube once a week.
But whilst we’re seeing a rise in brands creating videos we’re also witnessing a slight decline in people actually viewing them. Is it because we’re now being flooded with videos and it’s becoming a saturated marketplace? Or is it because this flood is marked by boring, 'me too',, non-engaging videos
The answer is both. But while the flood…
Our alerts and advice on the "must-know" developments in digital marketing
In August our two most significant alerts were about changes to the Facebook and Google algorithm - check these out in the sections on search and social media marketing below.
Now we’re into September we’re into the final build-up to our Digital Impact conference which is in central London on the 17th September.
We’re looking forward to meeting members at the event where we'll show how to make a bigger impact with your digital marketing with in-depth case studies and workshops covering all the digital marketing techniques we cover in our monthly updates, that’s Digital Transformation, SEO, AdWords, Content, Social and Email marketing plus improving desktop and mobile experiences using CRO and analytics.
Strategy and planning
What influences purchase of your product or service? - Our new infographic showing how your marketing communications should match your customer’s…
